Making Cloud Automation Work for Your Business

Spending time waiting for the help desk to approve a process or tech support to flip some switches isn’t just an inconvenience — it’s also bad for business. Replacing cumbersome, manual processes with cloud automation and orchestration gives your business an edge, increasing productivity and flexibility while decreasing costs and human error. Our next generation converged cloud platform provides the security and performance of a private cloud with the flexibility and self-service of a large public cloud provider.

Benefits of Next Generation Cloud Automation and Orchestration

Cloud automation removes the temptation to use shadow IT.

Traditionally, when end users want to provision additional resources, it goes through a help desk. For example, if a developer wants to spin up a virtual machine, they have to fill out a request, which goes into a queue. IT can take anywhere from a few hours to a few days to get to it.

There’s a good reason for this. The help desk has to make sure that the request doesn’t violate regulatory compliance, pose undo cyber security risks or otherwise violate their contract. But the fact is, it’s really inefficient. Developers don’t want to wait around for hours or days, so they contribute to shadow IT — i.e., they pull out a credit card and spin up a VM at AWS, avoiding the inconvenience, but also bypassing necessary internal safeguards.

In Symmetry’s next generation cloud, automation and orchestration fulfill the role of the help desk. Customers sign into our ServiceNow portal, and request resources as normal. The portal checks their policy to ensure the request complies, instead of making them wait for the service desk to get around to it. Provisioning is quick and easy, and removes the motivation to increase shadow IT.

Cloud automation and orchestration enable auto-scaling to support burstable workloads.

Companies need to size their IT landscapes carefully. SAP HANA performance tuning requires extensive testing and expert management to ensure each component application retains adequate resources to meet demand. At the same time, companies must economize during times of low demand to control costs without sacrificing performance.

It’s a tricky balancing act. Sudden, unexpected demand surges can overwhelm your resources, slowing applications to a crawl and potentially creating knock-on effects that can slow other parts of your system, or even lead to outages.

Symmetry’s next generation cloud software provides cloud automation and orchestration tools to auto-scale your workload, increasing compute to cope with demand surges and lowering it to maintain cost-effectiveness in periods of low demand. Our APIs allow organizations to configure applications to spin up new instances, add or remove compute from existing instances, or burst into another cloud as needed. This supports hybrid cloud adoption.

Next Gen Cloud Automation Shrinks Your Vendor Portfolio

Different types of workloads have traditionally required different clouds. The public cloud is often used for workloads without stringent performance needs, along with big data storage and workloads that require rapid scaling. Meanwhile, the managed private cloud is more often used to host mission critical workloads requiring careful configuration, high security and consistent performance.

This has led to increasingly complex vendor portfolios, complicating integration and oversight and even endangering stability. If any one vendor changes their platform or suffers a service interruption, it can cause unpredictable (and potentially damaging) problems for the whole IT landscape.

Symmetry’s next generation cloud automation and orchestration solves this problem, allowing organizations to return to a simple, dependable single-vendor hosting model. Rapid and flexible provisioning allows customers to address high performance workloads like SAP HANA hosting, alongside traditional, legacy and hybrid workloads. Customers can benefit from the dependability and security of a managed cloud throughout their landscape, while controlling costs and complexity with a single-vendor deployment.

Contact us to bring the benefits of the next generation converged cloud to your business

As the DevOps Architect at Symmetry, Dan brings seven years of experience in IT Automation, Cloud Infrastructure, Data Center Operations, Network Engineering and Storage Administration. Dan has experience in designing, implementing and developing automation tools in Perl, Python and Java using a variety of frameworks such as Ansible, Catalyst and Spring.